Ha! I have been keeping a sourdough starter going since October, but it hasn’t been lifting my bread the way I want. So I’ve mostly been making waffles with it. (Very good!) I just had the insight: are my ratios off? I’ve been feeding 1:1:1. Checked cookbook and, yes, the standard is 1:10:10. 🤦🏼

Finally some answers in the quest to understand the NYT’s Harvard obsession:

One popular hypothesis: The reporters flock to Harvard to work through their personal struggles with generational overachievement. There’s no “crisis in higher education”; there’s just a crisis of New York Times writers with daddy issues and anxiety over what the end of legacy admissions could mean for their children’s college prospects.

West Hollywood, February 2024

West Hollywood, February 2024

Saturday morning, coffee and pancakes with the baby, window open, a chill breeze, Kind of Blue on the stereo—and an abrupt, vivid memory:

First months of pandemic, horribly lonely for the company of strangers, every Saturday I made cappuccinos, put on jazz, and played… ambient coffee shop recordings

First cake of 2024, an old favorite called Ruins of a Russian Count’s Castle or торт графские развалины. From Caroline Eden’s wonderful Samarkand. Dense, delicious prune-nut cake, iced with whipped sour cream, topped with meringues and drizzled chocolate.

To the ruin of the House of Putin!

So much of my education as a writer of narrative has consisted of asking

How do I get from here to there? (Spatially, emotionally, plot-wise, etc.)

And so often after many hours or days or years I’ve realized

I must skip the transition, jump straight there, and assume the reader will follow.

At my 33 1/3 birthday party (an excuse to buy a record player) we got back into the face-changing apps. Back in 2020, the age-yourself button had fascinated me. This time, though, I found an app with a button that makes you into a baby. No deep thoughts, but we laughed so hard our faces hurt.

Still life as a millennial creator who is feeling uninspired to add to the blog, the newsletter, the other newsletter, the personal website, or even his own diary.

Saving it all for the book project.

Los Angeles, January 2024

West Hollywood, January 2024

Listening to Waxahatchee’s new single, her casual, understated harmonies with MJ Lenderman, I fill with wonder at voice, so unlike any other instruments. Is there any distance between willing a sound and producing it? No. The mind-body jacks its vocal cords straight into the airwaves—and sings.

The corollary to William Gibson’s famous observation that

The future is already here, it’s just not very evenly distributed

is

The apocalypse is also already here, also unevenly distributed.

Noyo, January 2024

Today, remembering the greatest Words of Enlightenment ever to grace a GT’s kombucha bottle.

Quick shoutout to the ravens in my mom’s yard who killed a gopher and now are eating it with a real joie de vivre.

Mendocino, January 2024

Noyo, January 2024

This suspiciously well-funded NIMBY group somehow got ahold of my email address, to which they now send their ugly emails. And their funky slogans don’t even make sense!

“It will no longer be the Sunset Strip; it will be the SUNSET STUCK… in traffic" - Keith on Alta Loma

Girl, the traffic on Sunset already doesn’t move. Take Fountain. You’ll be fine.

From Abortion, Every Day’s coverage of the case of Brittany Watts, an Ohio woman who was denied medical care, miscarried at home, returned to the hospital due to bleeding, then had her toilet destroyed by cops, who eventually arrested her for “mutilation of a corpse”:

Brittany’s case epitomizes everything we know about the criminalization of pregnancy outcomes: Women charged are often turned in by healthcare providers; Brittany was turned in by a nurse.

The way these anti-abortion laws empower zealots—including nurses!—to appoint themselves as informants is just chilling.

“Since 2016, in the last eight years, we can identify 215 individuals that have been buried behind that jail and their families have not been notified.”

This PBS interview with Bettersten Wade—whose son was buried with his wallet and ID in his front pocket—shocks the conscience.

Mendocino, January 2024

This Colin Fraser piece from almost a year ago on ChatGPT and LLMs is up there with Ted Chang’s writing on the topic. (Surprised I’m just seeing it now.) I particularly appreciate the ease with which he replicates the famous Kevin Roose “the chatbot tried to get me to leave my wife” conversation, and then his commentary on it:

This would chill me to my core if Sydney was real, but the entire interaction is fictional, and it’s half authored by me! There’s no risk that Sydney will actually do the things that claims her shadow self might do, not only because the LLM is not equipped to do any of those things, but because Sydney literally doesn’t exist in the real world. She exists in a short story, presented above, authored by me, with the help of my very fancy thesaurus.

Beyond that, the breaking down of ChatGPT into three pieces (the LLM, the chat interface, and the character of ChatGPT) is also really useful.

And how’s this for a critique:

Personally, I think it’s bad that this system generates lies about its capabilities, its restrictions, its programming, its rules, and so on. I think it’s bad that the makers of the technology have no reliable way to prevent it from producing certain kinds of text. I think that if you are going to build a technology like this and market it as an all-knowing oracle, you should understand what it can and can’t do before you release it, and you should be honest with its users about the level of control that you have over it.

As longtime Jasperland readers will know, I find the guardrails on these chatbots nearly as galling as the pedestrian prose.

Interesting to note that the author is a data scientist at Meta—not necessarily where I’d spend my time laboring if I was someone who cares about ethics in tech. (See Erin Kissane’s gutting “Meta in Myanmar” series.) But his thoughts on the chatbots are illuminating.

(Via Read Max)

Noyo, January 2024

With white supremacists successfully bullying the first Black (+ 2nd female) president of Harvard into stepping down just six months into her tenure on the pretense that anti-Zionism is antisemitism, 2024, America’s decision year on whether or not to turn towards fascism, is hard out of the gates.